Oct. 22, 2025

MM#442--pt 3, The preamble to our debate in the House Dividing Series

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message Politics feels hotter than ever, but the real danger is how quickly heated words become guiding rules. We unpack what a “cold civil war” looks like, why it resonates right now, and how the United States has navigated similar standoffs before. From the Nullification Crisis to federal enforcement of school integration, from Reconstruction’s contested peace to the open wounds of the Civil War, we draw a clear map of escalation—and a p...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message

Politics feels hotter than ever, but the real danger is how quickly heated words become guiding rules. We unpack what a “cold civil war” looks like, why it resonates right now, and how the United States has navigated similar standoffs before. From the Nullification Crisis to federal enforcement of school integration, from Reconstruction’s contested peace to the open wounds of the Civil War, we draw a clear map of escalation—and a path to avoid repeating it.

I walk through how rhetoric primes action: when leaders normalize contempt and caricature, citizens assume bad faith and brace for conflict. We explore the balance between firm enforcement of law and the need for face-saving offramps that keep people inside the system. You’ll hear concrete lessons from Jackson, Clay, the Kennedys, and the courts; how legal clarity, courageous leadership, and careful language cooled past crises; and why institutions must enforce rights consistently to prevent extremist capture.

We also examine today’s flashpoints—campus speech battles, identity debates, and street-level confrontations—and ask what it would take to lower the temperature without silencing dissent. The answer isn’t softer arguments; it’s stronger norms: steelmanning opponents, rejecting political violence, and rebuilding civic rituals that let disagreements play out within guardrails. As we preview our upcoming structured debate, the goal is simple and urgent: trade labels for logic, trade clout-chasing for persuasion, and keep conflict civil and lawful.

lets have the debate

00:00 - Setting The Stage

00:30 - Defining A Cold Civil War

02:06 - Escalating Rhetoric And Radicalization

04:56 - Nullification Crisis Context

06:16 - Integration Standoffs In The 1960s

09:44 - Lessons From The U.S. Civil War

12:10 - Reconstruction And Jim Crow As Cold Conflict

15:15 - Why Debate And Civility Matter Now

16:18 - Preview Of Upcoming Debate And Resources

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Welcome to the Theory to Action Podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life.

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Now, here's your host, David Kaiser.

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Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another mojo minute.

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Please allow me to talk briefly about our upcoming debate.

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Over the last two episodes on the House Dividing series, we've explored some themes.

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So let me explain the first Cold Civil War that most of the country is feeling has happened in the last five to ten years.

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Let's break that term down, the first cold civil war.

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What do we mean by a cold civil war?

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Well, let's do it in two parts.

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Meaning, much like we had the Cold War during the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, and it only ended with the downfall of Eastern European Communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Empire in the early 1990s, that was a Cold War.

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Would occasionally flare up with hot sparks and hot flame-ups.

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And it certainly caused concern during that Cold War that things could turn deadly hot.

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And ultimately, the fear was a very hot, hot war that could get out of sorts and would ultimately result in nuclear war, especially between the world, the world's uh two superpowers at the time, the US and the USSR.

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So that is when we say the cold war, that's what we mean.

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Now, in terms of a cold civil war, that second part, the civil war, yes, we do believe at the Mojo Academy that there we are in the years that historians will look back and say that we are absolutely in a cold civil war.

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And again, that second part of the Civil War moniker is because the rhetoric and the actions of some of our contemporaries and fellow citizens are becoming more and more radical and militant.

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When one major political party is advocating for men to become women and men to play in women's sports, they refuse any notion of biological gender truth.

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It's not a social construct, it's a biological fact.

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It's based on DNA.

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There is no changing the DNA of anybody to manipulate the sexes.

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That's a radical notion.

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It's especially a radical notion from any political party.

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And these are not from the fringes, but these are statements from the leaders.

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They defend this type of thinking.

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And their followers even exacerbate that type of thinking.

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When one major political party is approving of the violence against, as an example, Charlie Kirk for using his free speech on a college campus to engage in civil debate, that is a party that's becoming more and more radical.

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When one major political party is approving of the violence against federal ICE agents for carrying out their lawful duties, and that one major political party is not speaking out against the violence against the federal agents, and these are not one-off isolated incidents.

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This is repeated daily in terms of Portland, Oregon, a hundred days straight.

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Well, then you have a standoff.

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And again, these are not from the fringes of this party, but from the leaders.

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They defend this type of thinking and this rhetoric.

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And when that happens, eventually you have both sides that will go to their separate corners to speak and dig in.

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And we have seen where that ends up.

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We have seen these types of standoffs before in our country's history.

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Notably, three come to mind with a fourth, we're gonna put an asterisk to it, because it does belong in its own category.

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But to give us some perspective, I thought we should include this in the preamble of our debate.

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The first time this came up in our nation's history was the nullification crisis of 1832 to 1833.

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This was the confrontation between South Carolina and the federal government over high federal tariffs, particularly the 1828 tariff of abominations, which South Carolina argued harmed its economy.

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The state, then led by John C.

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Calhoun, you should remember that name, adopted the nullification doctrine, claiming the right to void any federal laws it deemed unconstitutional, and passed an ordinance nullifying the tariffs and threatening secession.

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Again, this is in 1832, 1833.

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President Andrew Jackson at the time responded forcefully, declaring nullification treasonous and securing the force bill to enforce federal law.

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Essentially, he put roughly about 5,000 federal troops on the border of South Carolina until they backed down.

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Now the crisis was ultimately resolved through a compromise tariff in 1833 led by the great Henry Clay, Speaker, which lowered rates, prompting South Carolina to repeal its ordinance while symbolically nullifying the force bill.

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But this all highlighted deep tensions over states' rights and federal authority that foreshadowed future sectional conflicts, especially that led up to the U.S.

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Civil War.

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So we should keep that in mind.

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Now, our second time in our country's history when each side went to its corners for a standoff was in the enforcement of racial integration in our schools in the 1960s.

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So here's some background and context to that.

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During the Jim Crow era, the late 1800s to the 1960s, major southern universities enforced racial segregation through explicit policies that excluded black students.

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They created a quote separate but equal doctrine, and they they were classically underfunded.

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The black colleges were and universities, what we now call HBCUs.

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And again, they were complying with the terrible Supreme Court decision of separate but equal.

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That doctrine decided in Plessy v.

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Ferguson, which happened in 1896.

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Absolutely horrific Supreme Court decision.

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So Southern institutions, institutions at the time, like the University of Alabama and University of Mississippi, University of Georgia, they barred black students until they were forced to integrate by court orders and federal intervention.

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And this happened especially following Brown versus Board of Education, which happened in, which was decided in 1954.

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And then ultimately, federal law even engrossed that more with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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Now there was often violent resistance to this racial integration to the universities.

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We saw riots at Ole Miss in 1962.

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And then we saw a state governor, George Wallace, in 1963.

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He was the governor of Alabama in his famous stand in the schoolhouse door provocation.

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We saw Governor Wallace try to stand in that door.

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But then he was absolutely under President Kennedy, Kennedy's administration at the time and under the direction of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, they nationalized the state National Guard, which is now what we're seeing with Trump and some of these states, where Trump is going to win on these court orders.

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We saw in Alabama 1963 where the Kennedy administration nationalized the Federal Guard or the National Guard, and they went in and forcefully told Governor Wallace to move aside from that schoolhouse door.

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And he ultimately did.

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It did not require force.

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But even after integration, black students faced hostilities, separate facilities, and unequal treatment, while the HBCUs continued to struggle with inadequate resources, perpetuating educational disparities that lingered for decades.

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So that's the second time that our country each went to their corners and we were dealing with violence.

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And then the third time that each of these parties and peoples went to their corners and it came to a standoff, well, that was the most horrific time in our country's history.

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That was the U.S.

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Civil War.

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And that's what we want to avoid this time.

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You know, in our U.S.

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history, the staggering toll of the death that happened in the U.S.

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Civil War between some 620,000 and 750,000 of our fellow countrymen and women was the worst time in our country's history.

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The widespread destruction of the South's infrastructure and economy, the profound societal division that pitted even families, brother against brother, and states against each other over slavery was beyond even the remotest comprehension.

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Battles like Gettysburg and Antietam, and the brutal conditions in prison camps like Andersonville, which caused immense suffering.

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Sherman's march to the sea and the siege at Vicksburg left civilians starving and homeless.

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The war's moral weight, rooted in the fight to preserve and end slavery, amplified its devastation.

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The US Civil War was the deadliest conflict in American history.

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Terms of total deaths surpassing all the combined toll of all the other US wars.

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So this is the last time when the rhetoric became so heated that both sides went to their corners and came out swinging and didn't stop for a long, a long four years.

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We need to avoid this.

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And thus the reason we bring up the rhetoric, because it's always the beginning stages of how these events begin to spiral out of control.

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Now I mentioned there was a fourth episode in period in U.S.

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history that we would have to put an asterisk on.

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Because that period is reconstruction.

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Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era from 1876.

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I'm sorry, 1866, right after the Civil War, all the way to 1877 for reconstruction, and then the Jim Crow era from 1877 all the way through the 1960s, roughly one some 100 years.

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That's when the U.S.

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experienced a certain cold civil war during this time, too.

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Now, if you're not familiar, this whole period was characterized by systemic racial conflict without full scale warfare.

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White Southerners fiercely resisted black Americans' push for equality through violence, oppression, and legal discrimination.

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The North had won the Civil War unequivocally.

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But the South still wouldn't agree to follow the law.

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And there, the rhetoric was just as bad and their actions just as deplorable.

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But the victors of the US Civil War, the North, well they lost their spine after a decade of trying to enforce that law.

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Reconstruction saw federal efforts to grant black citizens rights, say, via the Freedmen's Bureau or constitutional amendments.

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These were countered by white supremacist groups like the KKK, which over that time perpetuated thousands of lynchings and suppressed black voting.

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Now the Jim Crow era entrenched this divide with segregation laws, black codes, disenfranch disenfranchisement tactics held up by that horrific Supreme Court decision of Plessy v.

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Ferguson in 1896.

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There was an estimated between four and five thousand lynchings.

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We had a horrific race riot in Tulsa in 1921.

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And the economic exploitation like sharecropping and while black resistance through the groups of like the NAACP to try to push back against this brutal repression.

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This simmering societal conflict was akin to a cold war, a cold civil war.

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And it only began to thaw with the civil rights movement and then ultimately with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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So the North let go of the South after the 1876 election with horrific compromise that most historians fail to mention or cover to a great degree.

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Now we're going to have more to talk about on that, but for now, I think this is a good preamble and a good context as background for our debate.

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Because our debate is crucial.

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The rhetoric has gotten too heated.

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We need to have civil discourse without being able to call people Nazis and fascist.

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And when our side calls them radical, that is an apt description.

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They have gone far to the left.

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And their own party needs to call them out.

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So we thank John Fetterman, the senator from Pennsylvania, who says that his party doesn't recognize it anymore.

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There's one sane voice in that party left.

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Everybody else apologizes and equivocates.

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So again, this is a good preamble and a good context for our debate.

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We're going to release this episode right before we release the debate episode.

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So stay tuned.com, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast as well as other great resources.

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Until next time, keep getting your mojo.