It's Thursday, January the 6th, and welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover Institution

broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical issues.

I'm Bill Whalen. I'm a Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow, and I will be your moderator today.

I'd like to wish you all a belated, happy New Year, and that applies to my colleagues who you see

before you, the three of my colleagues, who we joking refer to as the Good Fellows.

That would include the historian Neil Ferguson, the economist John Cochran, and the Geostrategist

Slash, Hopeless, Optimist, Lieutenant General, H.R. McMaster, Hoover Institution, Senior Fellows, geostrategist slash hopeless optimist lieutenant general h r macmaster hoover institution senior fellows all

gentlemen a happy new year to you i hope your 22s are off to a good start so far and we're

to do something a little different to start off the new year we turned over the show to our viewers

we asked them a few days ago to send in questions and And as per usual, they did not disappoint. Our

producer Scott Immigrant and I went through the mailbag the other day. We came up with questions

from no less than viewers in 24 states across America, 20 states across 20 nations, excuse me,

across the globe and three continents. We have now received questions from six of the seven continents.

Neil, if you know anybody in Antarctica, please get them to write to us so we can close the loop on that. So if the three of you

are ready to play, let's get right to it. And here's a question to all three of you. It comes from

Ed in the UK. He writes, quote, in reference to how civil wars start by Barbara F. Walter, is the U.S. heading towards endemic violence and civil disorder? And what can be done to prevent that is 1970s Northern

Ireland a possible outcome? I don't think it is. And the reason I don't think it is,

is that it's really hard to have anything resembling a civil war unless the military divides.

That's certainly the lesson of the

US civil war. I also don't think it's appropriate to think of the situation in Northern Ireland

in the 1970s. I mean, there you had a profound religious division between Catholics and Protestants that stretched back to the

Reformation, where you would see the date 1690 painted on bus shelters. The United States is not

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