That's true.
Host of Hardcore History. I do other stuff too. Find our (free) irregularity updated newsletter at https://dancarlin.substack.com Website: www.dancarlin.com
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That's true.
So, my last scheduled live event for 2025 is in my home away (but not too far)from home Portland, Oregon. The last one we did there sold out...hope we do that again! If you want to go, we'd love to have you. www.etix.com/ticket/p/943...
“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.” ― Marcus Aurelius
Just touched down in Houston. Looking forward to tonight's show! If you want to join me, tickets are available via our website at www.dancarlin.com
Haha...yeah...I'm ready for October.😂
Thanks so much for coming!
Tonight ran about 100 minutes or so.
Thanks Austin! You were FANTASTIC! Great crowd, so enthusiastic. Houston tomorrow night!
A few hours from showtime in Austin...looking forward to seeing you guys!
En Route to Austin for the show tomorrow night, then Houston on Saturday and (other than Portland in Sept,) I think that'll probably be it for the year. Hope to see you! Tickets available from www.dancarlin.com
Robert, I'm gonna use your post as an opportunity to thank all the people who came out to the event. I can't always do the handshaking stuff...different venues,different rules...but I wanted you all to know how much I appreciate it. It was a great night too.
Just got the word that Ben Wright of "the 15 Minute History podcast" will moderate our Aug 16th Houston show in addition to the Aug 15th Austin event. So for both shows I'd wager that means "WW1 is back on the menu boys!" Tix available at www.dancarlin.com
Lord...they're babies. Except Paul Cook. He looks to be in his early 40s.😂
"Darkly Hilarious" is an interesting way to put it. Whoever thought THAT would be the aspect of those shows to make them later seem dated.
That's absolutely true.
"In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues." -Thomas Macaulay (1849)
Atlanta and Raleigh were really fun. Thanks to all who came out! Met some great people. Austin and Houston (Aug 15th and 16th respectively) are next. Then one Portland show in Sept and that's it for the year I think. Tickets for those shows available at www.dancarlin.com
Ok Raleigh! My first time here and I'm really looking forward to tonight's show. Hope y'all can make it!
Atlanta, thank you all SO much for coming out tonight! You all were great. I'm such a fortunate person. My listeners have made my life...and it was so nice to shake some of your hands and tell you that face to face. Thank you!
Thanks my friend! John ( www.johnroderick.com ) is great and we DID have a blast. He'll do Atlanta (tonight) and Raleigh with me tomorrow. Hope we live up to the hype! (Tix available at www.dancarlin.com ).
The fabulous @johnroderick (on Instagram) will be the moderator (weird title) at the live event I'm doing in Atlanta (Aug 1) AND Raleigh (Aug 2). He did the same thing for me earlier this year in Seattle and it was awesome! Join us! (Tix available from www.dancarlin.com )
Holy cow...glad to hear you're doing better though.
Well...some variation of that might be in the cards. Certainly audience participation will go up!😂
That sounds exactly like something "Ben" might say.
I was there three years ago! Might be time to come back...
Really pleased that you'll be there. Thank you.
So if we don't end up with a moderator at one of these August Southern shows I'm doing, those in attendance may witness the invention of my new one-person show. Perhaps in real time. "Hardcore History" indeed. You won't want to miss that. It'll be a complete surprise for all of us.
Checked the weather for my Aug 1 live event in Atlanta:expected to be down to 87 degrees with possible rain.Glad I missed this week's heat 😂 Hope you'll come out and help shape the night's narrative. I suspect some of "the deep questions" be on the agenda. www.ticketmaster.com/event/0E0062...
Thanks TIME Magazine for including us in your too100 podcast of all time list! time.com/collections/...
Reminder, i'll be in Raleigh on August 2.If you're nearby, come and join me! www.ticketmaster.com/event/2D0062... Also,I'll be in Atlanta, Austin,Houston and Portland this summer as well. Tix available from dancarlin.com
We at @vikingologypodcast.bsky.social had a fun convo with @dancarlin.bsky.social! Check us out! vikingology.substack.com/p/dan-carlin...
Well,this has made me think we must have term limits. Maybe only a single term. I realize we lose tons of experience that way (and we do), but so much of what's killing us in terms of courage is the craven willingness to sacrifice anything for re-election. Maybe better to just take it off the table?
That's true. And all the Iran-contra investigation hardly slowed things down at all.
Reminder that I'll be out in Atlanta August 1. Why not come on out and join me? Hope to see you there! www.ticketmaster.com/event/0E0062...
...um...yeah. Strong agree. It's my only silver lining outcome for everything we're going through now. A post-Watergate, presidential powers limitation reform moment (as happened then) spurred on by another power-hungry presidency. Sometimes reform only happens after bad things do.
Can anyone think of a good historical analogy for this Trump-Musk thing we have going on?
Indeed.
I think those are good points. I'd add that counter-insurgency wars have their own terrible, long-lasting aspects for the participants too (civilians included), don't you think? Different challenges, different types of scarring. As they say, "the worst war is the one you're in".
It IS too recent. We barely get into the 1970s on the most historically recent of our HH and HHAddendum shows. It's (as you said) still a "current event".
Just released a Hardcore History Addendum with the son of famed U.S. Marine (and author) Eugene Sledge. Sledge wrote one of the best combat memoirs from the American side of the Second World War. His son has written the definitive follow up! It's a great talk. dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3...
Which part?
Then you're gonna like our next HHA release. Should come out this week I think.
Or a thousand others that were similar. It's telling us something about both governing systems...and people. Especially large groups of people when taken collectively. The only new element is the tech/communication...but even without it, it feels like we've been in this movie before.
I said the same thing to my wife several times. I feel like I'm actually learning about the past living through what we're experiencing now. There WAS so much that was weird and hard to understand about earlier (similar) eras that I currently say to myself "oh...I get it now." A case study indeed.
We are in the bad place.
Thanks for saying that. Almost feels out of date already at the speed things are moving...
Ah yes! The angry eyes. Classic! Steven Lopez did those.
Mike is great though. Enjoy!
Which one do you mean?
What an awesome thing to say! Thank you.
They are all on our website my friend! www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-his...
Also, reminder that I'm doing some live events in the South this August (because you asked!). Here are the dates and locales (and places to get tix) if you're interested: www.dancarlin.com#upcoming-eve... Also doing Portland Oregon again in Sept (tix here: www.etix.com/ticket/p/943... )
Also posted something on Substack about our 20th anniversary. Remember that our Substack page is free and if you sign up we send you notices when new shows are released or something else you might care about happens. Consider signing up! dancarlin.substack.com/p/it-was-20-...
Some new art from Erich Sayers that we plan to use extensively. It's cool, isn't it?
And he never will. We haven't done that since the middle 1940s. And it's very possible we never do it again. The president can claim extreme wartime authority without a declaration of war occurring.That's already been done. All the wars the U.S. has been in from Korea onward were "undeclared".
The AUMF is one of those enabling measures. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was one too.
We can pretend this is different than it is-but look at history since 1945.Congress doesn't declare wars anymore,but we've had plenty of them.Presidents basically tell Congress: "We're doing this,get on board or don't"and Congress passes some "enabling"measure that preempts a constitutional showdown
...and the current POTUS even claims the power (I believe) to redirect funds Congress approved for something else. The problem is: what Congress is gonna be willing to cut off the funding to troops in harm's way? None, basically. So the War Powers Act is itself a fig leaf.
Presidents do not accept the idea that they cannot take us to war. They haven't since Truman. Things like the AUMF are fig leafs. Look at the War Powers Act to see what the actual law is. And you will see how toothless it is. Congress has ONE power here/now: cut off money. That's it.
See, but that's what's so nefarious here. The POTUS DOES have all this wartime authority. He shouldn't, but he does. There's nothing SCOTUS can do here. The missing element is Congress. The Prez' isn't supposed to be the one who decides to take us to war AND then get the powers...nowadays he can.
So, now that Iran has been bombed the question for we living here in the U.S. is does POTUS invoke his extreme wartime authority/powers or not?
I'm probably right😂. But let's hope I'm not. Weird things can happen reform-wise in periods after scary things occur. (Look at the reforms of the post-Watergate era for example). If we can dodge this current authoritarian bullet maybe we could be rewarded with some systemic reform/correction.🤞
That WAS nice. Thanks so much for sharing!
Ok, agree 100%. But you haven't used this power since the middle 1940s! We've had a lot of combat deaths since then. What are you going to do to claw back this power? (Because it NEEDS to be clawed back...)
We are facing a serious threat to democracy, law, and liberty. The abuse of prosecutorial power to intimidate, investigate, and detain political opponents is upon us. It is a constitutional crisis. I will keep speaking out until public outrage overflows. I just hope it’s not too little, too late.
a quick comic to dispel the demon of having not made a comic
Writers, if you have a minute--forgive yourself. Everybody else is also welcome to try.
I assume a lot of you have done those ancestry tests where you send DNA to a firm and they send you back things like "ethnicity estimates". Curious about your thoughts on those. I've done it myself...but I wonder what you think about the whole thing.
I'm not gonna disagree with that.
Agreed. It's like they don't know how to turn up the amplitude button from the level appropriate in a political clomate that is now a thing of the past. It's as though their volume only goes up to a 3, when we need an 11.
Our parties suck.One might suck worse than the other...but they seem to deserve each other. I mean,how did this guy get the job as the nation's #1 opposition leader? In a time of grave constitutional danger? If you told me he was voted in by the other side I wouldn't dismiss you out of hand. Geeze.
The history person in me can't ignore that I listened to the Cramps in 1979.46 years before that it was 1933. These were 1933's most popular songs en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_in... Punk rock as "oldies" will never sound right to me.But everyone used to say "Mozart was a punk",so maybe it tracks?
Thank you!
The legend always was the JFK had his advisors read it (supposedly to show how events can go from within human control one minute...to having a force all their own the next). If you can confirm or debunk that story let me know!
I was at one a few weeks back as well. Just as peaceful.
Yes,Tuchman's book is almost a good book to read simply to get a whiff of that era she wrote in, isn't it? A bit like Shirer's. Their own closeness to the emotions of the time add a useful element to the overall mosaic. They're not quite "in Cold Blood" yet historically-speaking.
Wonderful to hear. I just posted your pinned notice about it.
Well, let's just repost this then.
Just be aware, like a lot of people in allied nations that fought Germany twice in her lifetime (three times for some French folk) she's admittedly pretty anti-German. But she wrote that book only about 15 years after WW2's end. There were a lot of hard feelings still. As you might imagine.
Need.... 💔 #punk #punks #punkrock #cbgb #newyorkcity #punksnotdead #history #punkrockhistory
It almost makes you believe in fate. 😉
Nice of you to say. But can't take any credit...after all, we've seen a version of this movie before. More than once.
But the goal is to convince the ballast of society that your cause is righteous. If they get scared, they will support the calls for "Law and Order". This isn't theoretical, this is exactly what got Nixon elected in 1972 by a landslide. The goal is to be effective: so take note of your audience.
Me too!
Old school face to face contact with your neighbors. Funny how we could rediscover that there's power in that. But there is. And these rallies are helping to wake a whole new generation up to that fact. It's good for our political system.
Oh man...I can't thank YOU enough either. Thanks for helping me to get to here. 20 years doesn't even seem possible...
Absolutely agree. It's a dereliction of duty. Obviously I have a news background and we would have covered the hell out of this in 1990. The media is a different animal now. (It was always "if it bleeds it leads", but now it's like "if there's no blood there's no story"). Just awful.
Yes. It was fantastic. Empowering.
I was at the rally in Eugene. Seemed to be 4,000-5,000 people. All well behaved. Nobody blocked the street… People thanked the police for helping…it could not have possibly gone better. I'm really proud of everybody. It ain't easy to stay on task and message when there's so much to be upset about.
I'm just gonna say the amount of peacefulness that these large rallies where essentially nobody was in charge is stunning and fantastic.The media doesn't seem to be too happy though… Definitely looking for any violence they can play up. But the story should be how unbelievably wonderful it all went.
Thanks amigo!
Thank you my friend!
As fate would have it today is the 20th anniversary of our first podcast release. Who would've thought? 20 years.
Iran is a much tougher military situation than Iraq or Afghanistan. Iran has double the population of Iraq. it has as many people as Iraq and Afghanistan put together. Most of them on the younger side. (To name but one thing that would make it a very tough situation to get into). A huge commitment.
Not in U.S. history. This is totally off the map for our country.
This book is pure enlightenment. An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi. I basically had no concept of African History other than ancient Egypt and the European history of slavery and colonialism. I'm a wiser man now. Can't recommend it enough! #booksky
That's a really nice thing to say. Thank you. You made my day.
Tell me more about this "serious scrutiny" of which you speak. 😂 If serious scrutiny had any power to aid us I doubt we'd now be where we are. But I am a fan. I'm all for it. But when we're all living in alternate realities, scrutiny loses all its powers to help us. (No disrespect intended).
Maybe I'm being naive,but beyond a few strikes by air,it's hard for me to envision anything more substantial. But...I don't think it would be impossible to imagine POTUS using a few air strikes as a rationale for invoking war powers though. Saying "We are at war" on TV and then we're off and running
Let me state the obvious here:if somehow all this smoke about Iran turns into anything real involving any military action by US (hard to believe...If we go there we're truly in crazy town)the President could then drag in all kinds of little-used war powers to add to things like the Insurrection Act.