I'm Charlie Secks. Welcome back to the To the Contrary Podcast. I have some questions today,

including whatever happened to all those anti-government activists, the ones who said that we needed

the Second Amendment to fight against a tyrannical government. You know, the same kinds of people

who made heroes out of Kyle Rittenhouse and Ashley Babbitt, but were very, very quick to justify

the killing of Alex

Preddy. And also, whatever happened to the proud boys, have you noticed how quiet they've gone

lately? So I have a lot of questions that we need to dive into today. And joining me today to try to answer some of these questions, we're fortunate to have

Garrett Graff, who's a journalist, historian, an author.

And his newsletter has the cheery title of The Doomsday Scenario.

So welcome to the podcast, Garrett.

For people who think that I sometimes am a little bit negative,

I feel like I'm this ray of sunshine compared to the doomsday scenario.

But thanks for joining me.

My pleasure.

In my defense, since a lot of my history writing has been about nuclear weapons and nuclear war plans,

I had chosen the name three years ago when it was

meant to be more tongue-in-cheek. I say, well, and now it seems pretty much on the nose.

Exactly. Okay, so I want to start with the piece that you wrote a couple of days ago because it

helps explain something that is otherwise inexplicable. We use the term cognitive dissonance,

probably too much, but there's a lot term cognitive dissonance, probably too much,

but there's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on with the anti-government, anti-tirony,

Second Amendment folks about what's happening in Minneapolis. So I was particularly struck by your

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