The Listening Tube Welcomes Rick Hoppe

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, the listening tube welcomes a guest.

SPEAKER_01 0:04

My guest today is Rick Hoppy. Rick is a retired intelligence officer and military analyst, artist, and author of several books. Rick is also very studied in revolution, and with the current state of affairs in American politics and the recent primary elections, I thought Rick could bring us some insight about where we are and perhaps where we're headed. Rick Hoppy spoke to me from his home in Central Texas. Now, Rick, you're a retired intelligence officer, uh military analyst, artist, author, uh a renaissance man of sorts. We could talk about a variety of topics, but I'd like to focus on the subject of your latest book, Eight Stages, a primer on modern revolution. And I want to do that because I find the subject topical right now, as from what I see, there is an emergence of socialist political candidates who are reshaping the Democrat Party. Do you see this as a type of revolution?

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Well, it that that is actually a somewhat complex question. If you define revolution as one group exchanging the current uh state of government for their preferred state of government, it is a step along the way. Uh, it is a there is a general overall very slow movement towards revolution, and the uh most countries are in some level of revolution at all times, the the initial incubation stage, and usually it doesn't get out of that. The current slate of uh socialist candidates having swept the field, uh, especially in New York, is an indicator of a movement from a stage three to a stage four out of the eight stages. And the stage three being uh an activation, activation of the actual attempt for revolution. And that's all uh predicated on such things as uh organization, communication between organizations, coordination between organizations, and that kind of thing. When you move from uh stage three and you start moving into stage four, you have to get enough legitimate, as it were, lawmakers to go along with you because the stage four is actually what's called rupture. And that is the point where the I call them traditionalists versus the revolutionaries, where they actually start to break contact with each other and to operate entirely separately. I'm not I'm not saying we're there yet, but I can see that the movement is there, the the tendency towards that. It it is somewhat concerning to me, but the US is the US has managed to weather revolutionary movements in the past very well. We're fairly resilient, but this time it seems to be a little bit different from like the 1850s, which was the last major revolutionary movement.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

Well, if if as you say, we have moved from stage three of this type of revolution into stage four, then what does that tell us about how long it's already been happening? And why are we seemingly just noticing it now?

SPEAKER_00 3:34

Uh well, actually, incubation phase, which is the very first, and it's it's the normal state of most governments, has been in progress since I would say probably the early 1960s. Uh it kind of peaked a little bit in the night in the late 60s with the uh the anti-war movement, but they didn't have the organization and the discipline necessary to move themselves beyond play acting at revolution. The the problem is that we have a tendency to equate revolution with spectacle. Uh take around, for instance. Uh they are in an equilibrium state. They're not in a revolution. They don't have the uh what I call the revolutionary scaffolding, the organization to fall on that allows them to coordinate and communicate actions among disparate groups. But we have tens, hundreds of thousands showing up on the streets in Tehran who are actively demonstrating. So we where this is where kind of where we're at. Uh we kind of peaked a little bit during the BLM riots, but those weren't really revolutionary, those were more of an uprising, as uh defined, uh which is a a uh a very visible or and sometimes violent protest against the government in power at the time. Stages one through three, sometimes into stage four, can move in a matter of decades. The Russian Revolution took better than 20 years for it to move to stage three. Stage three to stage seven took about 18 months. So they move slowly until they don't. And so it's uh that's one of the problems uh that swimming upstream that I'm doing with this is people want to be able to say, well, how long does stage three take? Well, it takes exactly as long as it takes, and that's not a facetious answer at all.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Now, because we are in the primary season uh here in the United States, the socialists are trying to unseat incumbent Democrats. Yet many Democrats support them. Are conservatives and independents worried, or is this only a problem for the left right now?

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Uh well, uh as I see it, and this is uh, you know, I'm not exactly a political operative, but I've seen a lot of this. Uh I see the conservatives thinking this is very funny and this is a plus for the uh conservative movement or the Republicans as a whole. I don't think it's funny at all. I don't I think that it needs to be taken with seriousness because when you get into a revolutionary actual movement, there are actually three different groups. You have the revolutionaries, who are I'll call them the radicals. Now they could be left, right, as a matter. Radicals seek to totally change the government as it is. You have the traditionalists, which right now are the conservatives or the republicans, who basically want to keep the government the way that it is now. And then you have the moderates who are trying to dance along them uh on the razor blade and hope not to fall. The Democrat Party as a whole never managed to fall onto one side or another. And the radicals, uh AOC and this latest crop of democratic socialists, I use the term advisedly, are uh are shoving them into a box that they're going to have to either get out of or they're gonna have to crawl into bed with the conservatives to retain power. Do you see the Democratic Party uh splitting in two? Uh yeah. No, actually not splitting in two. I see the Democrat Party being totally subsumed by the radicals unless there is some precipitating event that causes an abrupt movement one way or the other. I see that the uh radicals are a rising power because they're very they're very attractive. They promise the best of all things to all people. And by the and by the way, they're free. So who doesn't like free stuff? And the moderate Democrats have been getting quieter and quieter over the past uh eight, nine years, just trying to keep their heads down and hope that they're not targeted, and that's not helping anymore. So I actually see the actual rich prediction, uh, and I'll I'll go ahead and hold you to a cup of coffee if I'm right, that the Republicans are going to move more towards the center, and that the Democrats, the current Democrats, the what we used to call the classic liberals, are gonna be moving to meet them, and it's gonna form the nucleus of maybe not a renamed party, but a reinvigorated party. That would be my guesstimate.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

And would that new in reinvigorated party be under the heading of Republican or Democrat? Or would there be are we gonna get the Bull Moose Party back?

SPEAKER_00 8:51

You know, and that thought occurred to me. I was just reading some stuff about Teddy Roosevelt, and it kind of pained into my brain that if they could find branding that would leave both the ultra-right conservatives and the ultra-left Democrats behind that would resonate with the people, I believe that you would probably see a very viable third party. And if they did that, uh I could see uh I could see a sweep of elections.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

Now, Rick, I'm a bit surprised by the enthusiasm for socialism from voters of all ages. It seems to me that people over a certain age have a much different opinion of socialism than today's young people. Are the Cold War people just dying off, or did we forget about the monumental struggle between communism and capitalism?

SPEAKER_00 9:53

Um I had this discussion here with a guy a couple of weeks ago, and I said, Do you remember your grandfather? And he goes, Yeah. And I said, and this guy, his family is old Texan, been there since uh the revolution in 1836. And uh I said, So do you remember your grandfather talking about how hard the winters were and how hard he goes, yeah. And I said, Did you stay awake for all of his recitation of all the problems? He said, Well, no. And I said, Well, why? And he said, Well, because it didn't really affect me. You and I remember the horrors of the Soviet Union uh fairly vividly, though we weren't involved in them. But uh people like Solzhenitsyn uh came out and wrote the Gulag Archipelago, and uh periodically uh some poor schmucky get gunned down trying to cross from East Berlin to West Berlin. So we had an object lesson present at the time. Right now, we don't have an object lesson. Russia is a virtual non-entity on the international stage. It has become fashionable to believe that Cuba is some kind of socialist workers' paradise rather than the moderate hell on earth that it actually is. What we've gotten is what I'm starting to call, we're entering what I call the algorithmic age, which is where opinions, attitudes, and information is curated via algorithms and various information operations, things like not operations, various information outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, uh, mass media on all sides of the aisle, and which has created a tribalism where if you're on the left tribe, you don't believe that socialism could be bad. And if you're in the right tribe, then you vividly understand that nothing's killed more people in the last 150 years than communism and socialism. People, and on top of it, people don't understand how money works. So all that free stuff, they don't understand that somebody's gonna have to pay for it. I just had a knockdown drag out with my uh a writers' organization over some of that same stuff was eventually saying, guys, but who's gonna pay for it? Well, no, it's it's medical care. Who's gonna pay for it? Well, no, it'd be free. No, you don't understand. You're gonna tell that doctor he's gonna work for free. He just spent the better part of a quarter million dollars to go through medical school. You're gonna tell him that you're going to mandate his labor? Mandated labor is another definition of slavery, and now the individual won't talk to me because I just brought up that just answer the question who pays for it.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Now, your book states that there are eight stages of revolution, and we've already talked about two of them. How many of them have you witnessed lately? And more importantly, where? I mean, how many, and and you did say that practically every country is in some phase of revolution, but where where are the hotspots right now?

SPEAKER_00 12:55

Uh and that's interesting. I have a newsletter I call Fault Lines that just started out and it discusses the hot spots. Believe it or not, um, what hotspot is Russia? Russia's revolution never stopped. From 1917 to present, they never quite terminated. They live in a state of perpetual revolution, uh, which is one reason why their economy is such a mess. Iran, if they speaking from my chair here in Central Texas, you can't bomb your way into a revolution. You can't airstrike your way into a revolution. So all the airstrikes were great, whoever helped provide or help develop the revolutionary organization in Iran. But here's a couple of surprises. Canada. Canada is right now going through a issue where the Western provinces are very close to passing actual resolutions to secede from the Commonwealth of Canada. That is that is a problem, and I don't think that people are taking it seriously enough. I initially had put that on the fault lines as something to watch. It has been getting a little bit worse and a little bit worse as the eastern half of the country moves left, the western half is rural and even ultra-rural, and they are definitely on the right side. They are something that needs to be watched because they're right on our border. Mexico, the new president, looked like she was going to be able to start trying to clean up some of the cartels, but I think the problem has gotten too big for her. It's a massive problem. It's not that she's incapable, incompetent. But should she actually be able to clean it up? I would imagine the revolutionary scaffolding is there from the uh cartels to be able to take the country back and take it strictly into a narco state. Those would be the three. Iran, Iran could break out with the necessary organization to be able to make a go of it. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen any sign of it. Russia's continual flirtation with terminating a revolution is rising again. The people are massively dissatisfied. The elites are starting to do what I call fracture. When you get fracturing among the elites, that would be the military, the intelligence, the security, and then the economic elites, when they begin to work at cross purposes, uh, when they start refusing to obey orders, that is the sign that you're moving into the later stages of a revolution. And they are on the verge, but they've been on the verge before.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

You mentioned that you can't bomb your way into a revolution. And I believe that. So is a revolution always an uprising by the people? And it is it almost always solved through violence?

SPEAKER_00 15:56

Uh very good question. Nobody's asked me that one before, but I've actually taken a look at it. A revolution without violence is usually called a coup. And that's a whole nother deal because it can either be uh it can either be violent or not, it doesn't matter. It's a change of government, it's a regime change that usually takes place from within. No, a revolution does not have to be violent. The only criteria for revolution is that the revolutionaries seek to replace the entirety of the governing system with their own. There is no other requirement to be able to meet the definition. You can legislate your way into a revolution. For example, if the government is, if uh legislatures are taken over by the radicals, they can actually legislate our democra our democracy, our republic actually, out of existence. And that will beat the criteria, the definition of a revolution.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

It's ironic you would say that. I just said recently on a recent episode that you can vote your way into socialism and communism, but you can't vote your way out of it.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

And I'll even put a finer point on it, Bob. You can vote your way into socialism and communism, but you have to shoot your way out.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

Well, that that was another question I had. Is when it comes to revolution, there there are either people who want to have it and people who don't want to have it. You can you can have a successful revolution without violence, but is violence the only way to stop a revolution?

SPEAKER_00 17:32

Actually, uh one of the chapters of my book is how to avoid it. There are discrete uh actions that can and should be taken. One is to avoid academic capture, to get in get to uh uh shut down the capability of academia to capture the thoughts and minds of the uh educated young folks. Number two is to empower the middle the middle. If you take a look at uh polls, some of the back tabs on the polls start showing things like uh economic status, and uh we find that the higher economic status and the lower economic status tend to be a little bit more uh approving of socialism or communism, as you will, because the higher level of status, the elites feel that should that happen, that they'll be able to reign over the rubble. And the lower economic status, a lot of them have the attitude, uh, right or wrong, well, I can't be any worse off than I am now. The middle, though, and I'm talking about the 50 and uh 50 percent or so of the country that is in the middle, whether they're Democrat or Republican, they don't see any value in a revolution. They just want logical change. And they're being actively thwarted by a a lot of a lot of different factors. I'm I'm in in a discussion right now with a guy about data centers and people trying to get people to understand how much China is involved in feeding information to these anti-data center groups. They're not Chinese sponsored, but it is not exactly a grassroots movement. So it yeah, it unfortunately all all of the stages are all interrelated. You can actually, and then on top of it, they're not linear. You can go from stage three, jump to stage five, back to stage four, everything go fall apart, drop back to stage one, and be at stage six consolidation in a couple of months. So it's very recursive.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

Now you you brought up a very important point just a few moments ago about academia, and one of the questions I wanted to ask you was what role does the education system play in the creation of a revolution?

SPEAKER_00 20:03

Historically, there are three organ three slices of society that have to be captured by a revolution for the revolution to succeed. And number one is the intelligence community, number two is law enforcement at the national level, and number three is academia because you can get an academic justification for about anything you want to do if you have enough of academia on your side. That is not to say that every left-leaning professor is a communist or socialist, but on the other hand, Mal called it the long march through the institutions. And it started in the 1950s and they are still marching. Uh the 1960s radicals are today's senior tenured tenured professors, and uh they're just looking for that one one last yeeha, one last chance to be able to make their uh their paradise on earth work.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

The American Revolution was unique in the sense that it was a declaration of independence from another country. How often is revolution an entirely internal dispute, and how often are they caused by outside sources?

SPEAKER_00 21:29

Well, that is another amazing. You are really full of questions that are making me have to go ahead and rack my brain. Uh, it could be said that the uh that the Civil War was in actuality a uh a revolution, an attempt at revolution. They tried to secede, but yet the military aspect militated against that. Your question, your question. What? I would venture to say that almost every revolution has got foreign entanglement and foreign involvement. At some level, that it is not critical and it is not a foregone conclusion that it has to be present. As a matter of fact, in many ways, a revolution that is couched in terms of a patriotic revolution, I want to restore us to government by the people, for example. You can't have over foreign involvement because you're going to lose a lot of your followers. There is a lot of foreign involvement currently with what's going on in the U.S. Whether that's revolution or not remains to be seen. They're trying. You have to be able to find your combat troops and you have to blood them, and that's been happening. But the problem that you've got is that you have not active, the middle has not gotten activated yet. See, for example, the Battle of Athens, Georgia in 1947, when uh a group of uh returning veterans for World War II were watching the an extremely corrupt county and city government just brutalized their people, and they set up their own candidates. The uh corrupt forces stole the ballot boxes, took them to the county courthouse, and the veterans rose up, raided the National Guard armory, and got dynamite and weapons, blew up a part of the county courthouse, hauled out the corrupt judge and sheriff, and forced an honest recount uh after finally the state police finally got there to take control of the scene. Nobody went to jail for that one. But it was an actual uprising and actual revolt. Uh, was it a revolution? Maybe on a micro scale, you could call it that, but I I wouldn't. I would say it was a more of an armed revolt. But it's the middle. You have to watch the middle. When the middle gets tired of it, uh, which there are indications that they are getting tired of it, that uh the laws are gradually changing along those lines, that is the point where we're going to be looking at either a schism in the country or a recapture of the government under the Constitution.

SPEAKER_01 24:19

So you had mentioned uh a Chinese influence, especially uh uh in relation to artificial intelligence and and data centers. And I do I do believe that the Chinese are trying to influence people here to uh battle against the data centers because then they will have the uh the advantage because their people aren't going to protest against data centers. They can do whatever they want in China. So let's say that we have the data centers and artificial intelligence becomes uh a predominant factor in our everyday lives. Could technology and the rise of artificial intelligence create a revolution and we'd have no choice but to be controlled by it?

SPEAKER_00 25:10

That is, I try, you know, I like I said I spent 35 years in the intelligence community. So I try really hard not to be paranoid, and it's a little hard to do sometimes. And as I watch the movement towards a cashless society, and as I watch the fact that people will gripe about uh what is it, uh every once in a while makes a rounds on Facebook. I don't give Facebook permission to use my photographs. Yeah, you did when you signed up and you keep uploading them to their servers, so what do you think? AI is a wonderful servant and would be a terrible master, but it's not AI we have to worry about, it's the people. AI will enable comprehensive surveillance of everything that you do, everything of every hour of every day, and it doesn't even have to watch you, it watches what you do. You use your debit card to order for DoorDash. Do you uh go get gas? Do you maybe say, I'm gonna go cashless? Where do you go to get your cash? You go to the bank, yeah, it's go it goes on a computer, or you go to an ATM. Yeah, that's not anonymous at all. Having been taught how to track people trying to help uh on a on a uh task force that was finding fugitives, people leave tracks everywhere they go. It's it's the rare person who can move through a society like ours without leaving tracks. AI can correlate that faster and better than the human mind can, and develop what we call a pattern of life profile. Uh, and that's already happening. That's already happening. Oh, yeah, it's being used for advertising purposes at the moment. Yeah, it's again the algorithmic age. The algorithms are in charge right now. What you buy, when you buy it, what advertisements hit your ears and eyes, uh, what products are available, what products are developed. Um, you and I remember, I don't know about you, but I'm an old rock and roller. I I saw Jimi Hendrix when I was 12 years old. Yeah, and I snuck in, yes. Right? But can you see radically different music being made today? Or does it all kind of sound a little the same? Because it's out it's algorithmically designed.

SPEAKER_01 27:36

And it's algorithmically designed by the the the data that that we supply. So yes, probably sounds the same.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

Yep. And uh I liken it to uh I love these bracelets, they look just like shackles kind of attitude. They don't it people want to put on the people that live for Instagram, for Twitter, I'm sorry, X, that live for their Facebook profile, they don't understand that they have managed to shackle themselves to it to the algorithms. But it's not a crisis yet. I don't know that it will become one, but I and I I take part in it. I've had Facebook for a long time, it was the only way to stay in touch with family and friends while I was bopping all over the world.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

I uh I would say that the odds on the chances of a revolution occurring in a stable democracy is fairly remote. I would say on the order of maybe 20 percent. I would say that a societal change at a rather major scale is fairly likely on the order of sixty five, seventy-five percent in the next few years because as you chart all of this movement of society, tribalism's getting worse. In an information age, information density and information uptake by people is actually dropping. We are spending more per child than any other free country in the world and getting less out of it. We've lost sight of what the uh goal of uh of a education is. It it is a quandary, and I wish I was wise enough to have uh examples of what needs to be done. The one thing that people don't do, which absolutely infuriates me, is they don't vote. They don't hold politicians accountable.

SPEAKER_01 29:42

What kind of revolutions are bad and what kind of revolutions are good?

SPEAKER_00 29:48

Wow. I have never had that question before. Um societal change is good. Societal change is a revolution of a type, but it's strictly aschew's uh uh violent, uh violent means. Uh I belie I'm I'm gonna tell you the truth. I believe that the uh your viewpoint on what's a good revolution and what's not depends on what side of the bar bar you're standing on. I thought that might be your response. Yeah. Uh yep. What's that old saying? Uh one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Yep. Uh people poo-poo the idea, but it's actually true.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

Now, do revolutions last? What kind of legs does an average revolution have?

SPEAKER_00 30:39

Uh well, it it it a lot depends. If it had not been for George Washington, the American Revolution wouldn't have lasted very long. It probably wouldn't have made it out of the 1790s or 1800. But George Washington set the tone when he declined to become the dick the dictator, the king, and uh set the bar for what we should be in relation to serving our our country. They they don't last all that long because when you hit stage eight, which is termination, you either get a populist who is either a monster or everybody's brother, or you get a tyrant, and the very low end of probability is a democra is a uh democratic republic. Out of those possibilities, the populist and the tyrant are the two most likely, and they don't have a very long lifespan at all. It measured in maximum two or three decades before there's another revolution. That's the other thing. You've seen that that uh logo of the snake who's eating its own tail. A revolution is that snake, but the tail is giving birth to the head. Every revolution sows the seeds for the next one when it terminates, it starts the process all over again. The only ones that don't do that reliably are the ones that end up with a stale government. And I was able in all my research to find one, and that's the U.S. I was not able to find one that gave birth to a stable government uh that was uh based on the will and uh consent of the people.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

And now we're about to celebrate our 250th anniversary. And I've said it before, John Adams was the most important president in American history because he was the second one.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

I'm going to steal that and use it. You're exactly correct. You're exactly correct. Instead of a hereditary monarchy based on George Washington's line, instead we got John Adams, who could not have been more different from George Washington, I don't think, and still been managed to make it into the presidency.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

Well, Rick, I really appreciate you spending some time with us in the listening tube today. It's been a fascinating conversation. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have.

SPEAKER_00 33:06

I sure have, Bob. I really have. I enjoy these kind of conversations.

SPEAKER_01 33:10

If you'd like to learn more about Rick Hoppe or read any of his books, including Eight Stages, a primer on modern revolution, you can find more on his website, wordsbyrick.com. Thanks again to Rick Hoppe for spending some time with us in the listening tube. Remember to follow the listening tube at thelistening tube.com and find the listening tubes this week in history and not the headlines. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm your host, Bob Woodley, for Thou at Infinitum.