Welcome to another T-Rex talk, and this one we are talking about totalitarianism.

This is a topic I wanted to get a little bit more into in last week's podcast, which was

sort of about totalitarianism. It was an article, we're mostly talking about an article in Slate

about radio usage and how there wasn't enough government oversight on radio usage and therefore it could be

misused. And a bunch of you wrote to me about that article and pointed out that I left off any of the

technical errors in the article and I really only talked about the ideological issues with the

article. That is true.

There was no time to go down the rabbit hole of technical errors.

The first of which was the premise that the January 6th rioters and

insurrectionists were able to use their radios with complete and total secrecy inside of

Washington, D.C., which is preposterous.

If you think about Washington, D.C., you will recall that it is the place where all the

foreign embassies and the NSA and the CIA and the headquarters of all the other

intelligence agencies are.

So, yeah, all scraps of radio traffic across the entire frequency are recorded all the

time in Washington, D.C. All of the things that the January 6th folks were saying in their little

handheld Walmart blister pack radios has been recorded and processed and stored. And if there was

anything really fantastic that was being

done on radio in the clear on January 6th, we would have heard it by now. But that wasn't the

point of the article. The point of the article was not trying to be a well-researched technical think

piece. It was a hastily slapped together fear-mongering, emotional feel peace because there's this dangerous area of

personal freedom that Americans still have with private and amateur radio and they might misuse it.

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